Payne&rsquo;s variations | The Economist Thank goodness Edward Elgar’s wishes were disregarded Feb 26th 1998 Tweet FEW novelists are brave enough to try to complete another's work. Jill Paton Walsh is a rare exception. She has set off a literary row by turning a fragment of a Lord Peter Wimsey crime story by Dorothy Sayers into a 320-page book*. Completing musical works is much more common, but somehow that does not make it any less controversial, as the simultaneous fuss over Elgar's third symphony shows. Many composers work right up to the end, dying in full creative flow and presenting posterity with the question of what to do with their unfinished works. Sometimes these have simply remained in their truncated state: there is no more moving or dramatic moment in music than the end of Bach's “The Art of Fugue”, which breaks off in mid-phrase, the point at which the composer died. In contrast, Mozart's “Requiem” was completed by one of his students, who had sung through the piece with Mozart on his death-bed. The 20th century has seen more problematic projects.

When Gustav Mahler died in 1911, he left two completed movements of his tenth symphony and sketches for the rest. Somewhat reluctantly, his widow gave a British musicologist, Deryck Cooke, permission to realise them, and Mahler's tenth received its first full performance in 1964. Critical reaction has been mixed, though many Mahler devotees are glad to have his musical last will and testament. But even Mr Cooke acknowledged that the piece as it stood did not represent its composer's final thoughts: “He would have elaborated the music considerably, refined and perfected it in a thousand details.” In this section Reprints Recently scholars have shown increased boldness in turning posthumous fragments into, for instance, performable tenth symphonies by Schubert and Beethoven and a seventh by Tchaikovsky. Such reconstructions required considerable detective work as well as informed flights of fancy on the part of the re-composers in order to supply material which, in the original fragments, is ambiguous or altogether missing. This inevitably raises the question of what proportion of the resulting composition is by the revered genius and what by his latter-day amanuensis.

These issues have come to the fore once again with the premiere of Edward Elgar's third symphony. Working on the piece shortly before his death in 1934, Elgar completed over 130 pages of sketches, but it eventually became clear that he would never finish it. He told a friend not to “let anyone tinker with it”, indeed to burn what he had written, but the friend subsequently published many of the sketches as part of a memoir of the composer. In 1972 they excited the interest of another English composer, Anthony Payne, who, 20 years later, was commissioned by the BBC to prepare the more complete parts of the piece for performance. The project fell through in 1994, when the Elgar estate forbade it but, before abandoning his labours, Mr Payne gave an illustrated talk on the BBC, stressing the value and quality of the sketches. The musical world pricked up its ears and the Elgar estate soon realised that, when the published sketches came out of copyright in 2005, anybody could tinker with them. Trusting the devil it knew, it commissioned Mr Payne to produce a full version of the symphony.

This he did, and it was performed in London in mid-February. Mr Payne's work aroused controversy long before it was finished. The fragmented nature of the sketches required much deciphering and speculation as to where Elgar had intended to fit them into the piece. In some places there was no material to go on at all—for the last movement, and therefore for the work as a whole, Mr Payne has had to invent a conclusion, drawing on his own sense of the Elgarian idiom, formed over some 40 years' devotion to the master. The controversy intensified with the work's first performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its appearance on CD (NMC 0053). Listeners at the premiere were struck by Mr Payne's fidelity to his predecessor's style and persuaded that he had done everybody a good turn in making more of Elgar's music available. As Mr Payne himself puts it: “An artist of Elgar's stature belongs to us all and . . . music as impressive as the third symphony should be made public.” And so it will be, under the honest if somewhat convoluted title of “The Sketches for Symphony No.3, elaborated by Anthony Payne”.

* “Thrones, Dominations”; Hodder & Stoughton; £14.99. Re-formed Elgar Is Seamless - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Re-formed Elgar Is Seamless March 06, 1999|By John von Rhein, Tribune Music Critic. Many an unfinished work by a major composer speaks more strongly to the imagination of music lovers than any number of completed pieces by inferior artists. The mystique that surrounds such symphonies as Schubert's B minor and Mahler's 10th, or Puccini's "Turandot" holds us in the thrall of the might-have-been, looking for answers even when we know none will ever be forthcoming. Such a mystique surrounds Edward Elgar's Third Symphony, which had its Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiere in an elaboration of the composer's sketches by Anthony Payne Thursday night at Symphony Center, more than half a century after the composer's death. Andrew Davis conducted. The British composer completed two big symphonies during his lifetime. At the time of his death in 1934 he left 141 pages of sketches for a third.

These materials lay untouched until the early 1990s, mainly out of respect for the dying composer's deathbed request that no one be allowed to "tinker" with them. But things began to change after Payne, a composer, critic and lifelong Elgarian, began nosing into the sketches. He fleshed out some of them purely as an academic exercise when a full reconstruction seemed impossible. His eventual conclusion, supported by the BBC, that beneath Elgar's jumble of jottings lay the torso of an important late-Romantic symphony gradually weakened the resistance of Elgar's heirs. Payne forged ahead with fresh resolve. Thus was the BBC Symphony able to give the world premiere of the Elgar/Payne Symphony No. 3 in London, under Davis' direction, in February 1998. The symphony quickly became the hit of the London concert season, while a Davis/BBC recording on the NMC label jumped to the top of the classical charts on both sides of the Atlantic. NMC has also released a fascinating companion disc in which Payne discusses his methods, with performances of the sketches on violin and piano.

There will always be those who raise the question of whether it is right to defy an artist's intention of suppressing his own work. Similar qualms were raised over Deryck Cooke's "performing version" of the Mahler 10th. Like Cooke before him, Payne rightly argues that the strength of the original materials more than justifies his realization -- further, that Elgar's final music belongs, in a broad sense, to the world. But it took someone of Payne's creative empathy and intuition to bring that music to life. The Elgar/Payne Third should lay to rest the hoary notion that Elgar was a burned-out case in his final years. Nearly an hour in length, the epic symphony is bursting with memorable ideas, from the heroic defiance of the opening to the visionary quality of the final pages. The Scherzo is a kind of woodland idyll, light and airy in contrast to the surrounding movements. The world-weary Adagio is suffused with Elgar's typical sense of solemn nobility; full of unsettling chord progressions, it ends quietly, magically, in midthought. The finale, which involved the greatest amount of guesswork on Payne's part, breathes chivalric majesty.

Nobody can pretend this is exactly how the Third Symphony would sound if Elgar had lived to complete it. Does that matter? Of course not. In building a symphonic frame for the sketches, Payne has given us an absolutely convincing "new" piece of mature Elgar, so seamless that one cannot tell what is Elgar and what is Elgar/Payne. Davis knows and loves Elgar's music and it showed. His fervent and imposing performance whetted everybody's anticipation of his arrival here in September 2000 as music director and principal conductor of Lyric Opera. Payne was present to share in the enthusiastic ovation. A program devoted to composers' last thoughts began with Mozart's final piano concerto, No. 27 in B-flat, K.595. Swiss pianist Andreas Haefliger, in his CSO debut, brought a cultivated sense of classical style, musical taste and proportion to the keyboard, even if it often seemed as if he were walking on musical eggs. The program will be repeated at 1:30 p.m. Friday, 8 p.m. Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Phone 312-294-3000. MORE: ELGAR: Symphony No. 3 Edward Elgar (1857-1934)  Anthony Payne (b Edward Elgar (1857-1934)  Anthony Payne (b. 1936) Symphony No. 3 Elgars last major completed work was the Cello Concerto, Op. 85, finished on 8th August 1919. The death of his wife Alice on 7th April 1920 shattered him: he described himself as a broken man. The music he wrote between then and his own death on 23rd February 1934 was all on a small scale: the Severn Suite, the Nursery Suite, piano pieces, songs, and orchestral transcriptions.

He did, however, embark on two major projects that never progressed beyond the stage of sketches: an opera, The Spanish Lady, with a libretto by Sir Barry Jackson, Director of the Malvern Festival, based on Ben Jonsons play The Devil is an Ass (begun in 1929), and a third symphony. On 7th January 1932 Elgars staunch ally George Bernard Shaw, who for years had been trying to persuade him to compose another symphony, wrote: Why dont you make the BBC order a new symphony? It can afford it. A few months later Elgar was seriously considering Shaws suggestion; on 29th June GBS wrote, on a postcard, Why not a Financial Symphony? Allegro: Impending Disaster. Lento mesto: Stony Broke. Scherzo: Light Heart and Empty Pocket. Allegro con brio: Clouds Clearing. Rumours started to spread.

On 4th August Walter Legge, then Editor of the Gramophone Companys house magazine The Voice, wrote to Elgar that he had heard, on what he believed to be very reliable authority, that you have practically completed a third symphony. Elgar promptly retaliated: There is nothing to say about the mythical Symphony for some time, probably a long time, possibly no time,  never. At a tea party during the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester a month later Elgar was said, by the critic H. C. Colles, to have referred to the symphony as written, but said it would be pointless to finish up the full score since no one wanted his music now.

On 30th September Shaw wrote to Sir John Reith, Director General of the BBC, reminding him that in 1823 (actually 1822) the Philharmonic Society in London had offered Beethoven £50 for the manuscript score of a new symphony, and that in 1827 the Society sent him £100; he was dying and he said God bless the Philharmonic Society and the whole English nation. GBS described this as by far the most creditable incident in English history and suggested that the BBC, with its millions, could do for Elgar what the old Philharmonic did for Beethoven. You could bring the Third Symphony into existence and obtain the performing right for the BBC for, say, ten years, for a few thousand pounds. The kudos would be stupendous and the value for money ample. The conductor Sir Landon Ronald acted as go-between, and the formal commission, offering a fee of £1,000, payable in four quarterly instalments, was made to Elgar in November.

At a dinner in Londons Guildhall on 14th December, immediately after the last of three BBC concerts celebrating Elgars 75th birthday (on 2nd June 1932), Ronald announced the commission publicly. The next day Fred Gaisberg, Recording Artists Manager of the Gramophone Company, wrote to Elgar about the possibility of recording the work immediately before or after the first performance (the following autumn?) but received an evasive reply, ending as to Sym. III  ?. Very little of the symphony, even in the form of sketches, seems to have existed at the time. On 5th February 1933 Elgars close friend and biographer W.H.

Reed, leader of the London Symphony Orchestra from 1912 to 1935, made the first of many visits to Marl Bank, Elgars house in Worcester, with his violin, to play through, with the composer at the piano, as much of the work as there was: sketches for the first movement, including a transition which I had to play countless times in every conceivable manner; the second movement, in place of Scherzo, of which he must have had the main theme (very light and rather wistful) in his mind for some years, as I have seen it scribbled in his scrap books in various forms; the slow movement, based on a broad, dignified and very expressive melody [in which] he exhorted me to "tear my heart out each time we repeated it" I was never able to induce him to write down the continuation, but I was allowed to play a bar or two (looking over his shoulder) from the fragments on one or two other scraps of MSS.

but I could never prevail upon him to divulge in what order they were to appear. The finale was open to various possible readings, but he never played anything to show in what manner it should end, not even improvisation, but would leave off suddenly and abruptly when we arrived near that part, and say, "Enough of this; let us go out and take the dogs on the Common". Also, he would be very restless and ill at ease, and would not discuss the symphony any more, and it would be quite a while before he became calm and resumed his normal good spirits. Shaw and his wife Charlotte, Basil Maine (Elgars first biographer) and Gaisberg were among the people to whom Elgar played (either by himself or with Reed) parts of the symphony, or even possibly an attempt at all of it, often in conjunction with excerpts from the opera.

When the BBCs first cheque for £250 arrived on 25th March, Elgar wrote to Reith: I am hoping to begin "scoring" the work very shortly up to the present the symphony is the strongest thing I have put on paper. On 27th April Adrian Boults assistant, Owen Mase, wrote to Elgar asking if the symphony would be ready in time for the first concert in the BBC Symphony Orchestras 1933-34 season, on 18th October. Elgar hedged once more, saying that no announcement about the first performance should be made at this stage. Mase then suggested May 1934 as an alternative; Elgar, in bed recovering from a sudden bad turn two days ago, wrote to say that he liked the idea. On 20th September he had another bad turn, as a result of which he was told that he must go to a nursing home to undergo some small operation.

As though he instinctively realised the seriousness of the situation, he wrote, on 7th October, to Reith: I am not at all sure how things will turn out and have made arrangements that in case the Symphony does not materialise the sums you have paid on account shall be returned. This catastrophe came without the slightest warning as I was in the midst of scoring the work. Perhaps it will not be necessary to refer publicly to the Symphony in any way at present; we will wait and see what happens to me. The operation revealed inoperable cancer and work on the symphony ceased. As he told his physician, Dr Arthur Thomson: If I cant complete the Third Symphony, somebody will complete it  or write a better one  in fifty or five hundred years. On 20th November the faithful Billy Reed went to see him. It was evident that he was trying very hard to speak; and gradually and at long intervals the words came from him.

"I want you to do something for me the symphony all bits and pieces no one no one dont let anyone tinker with it no one could understand I think you had better burn it." Reed then said I dont think it is necessary to burn it: it would be awful to do that. But Carice [Elgars daughter] and I will remember that no one is to try to put it together. No one shall ever tinker with it: we promise you that. In the last 42 pages of Elgar as I knew him (Gollancz, 1936) Reed reproduced, in facsimile, many of the most important and substantial of Elgars 127 pages of sketches (then in the BBC archives) which had accompanied his article, Elgars Third Symphony in The Listener of 23rd August 1935.

Other sketches are reproduced in Robert Andersons Elgar in manuscript (The British Library, 1990), and, most important of all, in Anthony Paynes indispensable monograph Elgars Third Symphony: The Story of the Reconstruction (Faber and Faber, 1998). Many of them date from earlier in the composers life and were originally intended for other works, notably the fragmentary oratorio The Last Judgement and the incidental music for Laurence Binyons play Arthur. Their quantity and variety account for Basil Maines shrewd comment after spending some time with the composer in August 1933. He relied partly on the sketches (so disjointed and disordered as to be a kind of jigsaw puzzle), partly on memory, partly I imagine on extemporisation.

During the improvised (or memorised) passages, it was possible to think that one was beginning to share Elgars vision, but the experience was so clouded and so fleeting that it could not possibly be re-captured by means of the sketches alone In the process of bringing forth a new conception every creative artist waits for that final moment of crisis which determines the greatness or ordinariness of the achievement. If the work is to be great, in that moment there comes the flash which lights up all the previous processes of thought, gives them unity, and orders their final relationship. It is my conviction that, in this last adventure, Elgar was still waiting for that final moment. The last revealing light had not yet broken upon his mind. Or, if it had, it broke when he lacked the physical strength to set down the signs.

This would explain the moody restlessness which came upon him after he had been playing some of the symphony to me  As Diana McVeagh wrote, some twenty years later, His mosaic method of construction is clearly seen in the sketches for his big works, which seem to have started from scraps and sections on individual papers with no intelligible indication of their order, but which ultimately were pieced together into his design. The sketches for the unfinished last works suggest that the scraps came into being easily enough but that the effort of final organization was too great: lack of concentration, not of inspiration, was what held back the Third Symphony and The Spanish Lady. Anthony Payne first came across Elgar as I knew him in 1972, and when he looked at the sketches he was (as he writes in his Introduction to the full score of his elaboration of the sketches of Elgars Symphony No.3), immediately fascinated by the power and vitality of the music.

It simply leapt from the page, and although most of the sketches were in short score, I immediately began to hear orchestral sounds in my head It was music that seemed to me to show Elgar in inspirational flight, and it gave the lie to received opinion that he had become a spent force after the death of his wife. Payne was, of course, aware of the embargo on tinkering, but this did not prevent him, now and then, from musing over the sketches in the privacy of my own room. In November 1993, however, Paul Hindmarsh of BBC Manchester asked if he would be interested in putting the sketches into some sort of shape for workshop performance. The BBC sent him photocopies of the complete sketches (by now housed in the British Library), which showed that Reed had overlooked many pages of considerable interest. By this time he had already completed the Scherzo, and with the aid of the new sketches he completed the Adagio, (writing the last bar on 23rd February 1994  the sixtieth anniversary of Elgars death, as he later realised).

Soon after this the Elgar family decided, after much deliberation, that they could not, in all honesty, over-rule the composers death-bed wish. The situation seemed hopeless, but then the family relented and gave their blessing to Hindmarshs programme, provided that Paynes tinkerings were not alluded to. It was broadcast in March 1995 (and later issued on CD, coupled with Percy Youngs completion of The Spanish Lady). The next day, thinking that that was the end of the affair, Payne suddenly realised that four pages of faintly outlined fragments in the sketches were intended for the first movements development section, and was able to complete both the development and the coda. In the summer of 1995, realising that Reeds book and the sketches it contained would be out of copyright in 2005, at which point anyone could legally construct the symphony, the family decided to commission from Payne a complete version. He then wrote out the full orchestral score of the first three movements and the beginning of the finale. It was while doing this that he became more consciously aware of the overall sweep of the symphony.

It was different in its sheer breadth of emotion from any of [Elgars] other symphonic works. There was the raw vigour and magic lyricism of the opening movement, the use of a lighter manner in the second which went far beyond his established symphonic practice, and the searing intensity of the Adagio, tragic in its import, while the finale revealed a world of chivalric action and drama. All this was at the back of my mind as I faced the last and greatest obstacle: nowhere did Elgar leave a hint as to how his symphony was going to end. I had to compose the whole of the development section and the coda, much as in the first movement, but without helpful pointers, and I had to envisage the works ultimate goal  the toughest assignment of all, involving visionary concepts if I was to be true to Elgars creative bravery. Elgar wrote out the first seventeen bars of the first movement in full score, and also a nine-bar passage leading back to the exposition repeat; the remainder of the exposition is written in short score, more or less complete in harmonic texture and with occasional indications of the instrumentation.

The magnificent, surging main theme in 12/8 and with prominent open fourths and fifths in contrary motion (music which sounds as if it has always been going on, as the sound of the sea, or the wind in the trees  inevitable music in Reeds words) is balanced by a hauntingly lovely second subject (Cantabile, E flat major) on the first violins, which Elgar associated with Vera Hockman, a young violinist he came to know in 1931. Paynes version of the development (referred to above) makes use of various short motifs familiar from the exposition (notably the rhythmic ascending figure first heard on the first violins in bar 11) and the first subject itself. There are various changes of mood and tempo, and more emphasis is placed on the tonic key of C minor than there was in the exposition (only eight bars), though about two-thirds of the way through there is an important episode (Alla marcia, B flat minor) based on a single rhythmic bar sketched by the composer.

The recapitulation curtails the first subject and re-introduces the second in the tonic major: a classical touch complementing the repeat of the exposition. Near the end, as Elgar put it, the two main subjects are skilfully combined. The Scherzo (or as Elgar headed it, in place of Scherzo) is in the form of a rondo with two episodes and a coda. The refrain, in A minor, has a persistent chirrupping motif on the first violins which Elgar took from the incidental music he wrote in 1923 for Arthur. The episodes, in G and A major and, on the whole, more lightly scored, are separated by a return to the refrain (developed and expanded by Payne, who also adds discreet references to the chirrups in the coda). The absence of any development sketches for the Adagio (in C minor) and the breadth of the material which the sketches have bequeathed to us, means that a development section would prolong the movement out of all proportion.

We should be thinking of a bipartite structure, with an exposition and varied recapitulation. The first subject (of which Elgar said in a letter to Ernest Newman in December 1933 that he was fond enough to believe that the first two bars, with the F sharp in the bass, open up some vast bronze doors into something strangely unfamiliar) is the grand, sombre paragraph with which the movement begins; the second, prefaced by a short, gentle transition, here scored for muted strings, is its warm, expansive but shorter counterpart in D major. Payne felt that it would be appropriate to conclude this exposition with one of those Elgarian passages  extraordinary moments of fantasy, dense with quiet activity, admitting that this was pure speculation on my part, but I went ahead and composed such a passage.

The varied recapitulation brings the second subject back in E flat (moving to C), elaborating the fantasy, and ends with a desolate coda, whose final phrase on one viola, lightly accompanied, Elgar wrote out in pencil and showed to Reed as he lay dying: All he said (with tears streaming down his cheeks) was  "Billy  this is the end". Anthony Paynes most formidable obstacle was to decide how the symphony was meant to end. Reed said that the finale was going to be "fiery" and "rugged"; certainly the opening is an unequivocal call to arms, and the first four bars give us the last remaining passage which Elgar fully scored. Combined with a busy arpeggio passage, it paves the way for a vigorous first subject, with a gentle pendant (or companion theme as Reed nicely described it). Elgars sketches contain three pages of material (all from Arthur) containing a number of interleaved themes as suitable for the second subject; several of these are combined here, and there is a closing section in 12/8.

It was not even certain what basic structure Elgar had in mind for his finale, Payne writes in his Introduction, although I felt that the breadth of the expository material in the sketches pointed towards a sonata form. This could be enriched by incorporating into the development a ravishing G minor interlude whose placing in the movement is not precisely indicated in the sketches. As it now stands, the passage seems to have strayed from some rondo sub-stratum and yields a structural ambivalence which I hope is worthy of Elgars symphonic thought. As for the symphonys closing pages, I decided to dare all in honour of Elgars unpredictability. What if he had thought to place the haunting repetitions of The Waggon Passes from his recently completed Nursery Suite into a broader symphonic context? The finales main subject actually suggests this kind of treatment, and it would lead the music away into some new visionary world, spanning the years between the composers death and my attempted realisation of his sketches.

I trusted my intuition and went ahead and wrote. At the end of The Story of the Reconstruction Payne writes, of the closing bars: I also tied up one or two loose thematic ends to strengthen the web of the works symphonic dialectic. The allusion to the first movements open fourths in the Scherzos uncanny cadence is picked up with a further reference, given to the first violins over the final C minor chord. At the same time, the basses and bassoons quietly resolve the cadence which the solo viola had left hanging in mid-air at the end of the Adagio.

Finally, with the whole of the rest of the orchestra silent, I left a quiet note from the tam-tam resonating in space, something of a personal signature  I had ended a work of my own that way some years earlier  but also a tribute to Elgars thematic use of percussion which had always fascinated me. The score was published by Boosey & Hawkes to coincide with the first public performance (at which a hundred copies of the score were sold) by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Davis in Londons Royal Festival Hall on 15th February 1998. Robin Golding BBC NEWS | Special Report | 1998 | Elgar | Anthony Payne on Elgar's Symphony No 3 Friday, 13 February, 1998, 16:22 GMT Anthony Payne on Elgar's Symphony No 3 Andrew Davis, Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with composer Anthony Payne The British composer Edward Elgar died in 1934, leaving behind 141 sketches for his thrid symphony. The piece was originally commissioned by the BBC.

Many decades later, the BBC's classical music network, Radio 3, asked the composer Anthony Payne to "elaborate" on Elgar's sketches. Anthony Payne describes how he completed Elgar's Symphony No 3. Anthony Payne The history of Elgar's Third Symphony has been well documented, but it is worth repeating the basic facts. Elgar's old friend George Bernard Shaw had often badgered the composer about producing a third symphony, and early in 1932 he renewed his attempts, suggesting that the BBC might be persuaded to commission it. The affair snowballed: newspapers got hold of the story, Shaw cajoled the BBC, and later that year Elgar actually spoke of having "written" the symphony, though clearly this was untrue in the physical sense. In December the BBC announced officially that it had commissioned the symphony, and from then on we may assume that Elgar worked with deep seriousness. Throughout what was to be the last year of his life, he put parts of the work down on paper - sometimes an extended section, sometimes just a chord progression.

Elgar had an extraordinary way of working, jumping from movement to movement as the spirit took him, and ideas sometimes came to him outside the context of a tempo: for instance, one sketch, clearly marked "scherzo", eventually ended up in the slow movement. By the same token themes from earlier years were pressed into service, including ideas for The Last Judgement, a projected oratorio, and episodes from his incidental music for Binyon's historical drama Arthur which he had composed a decade before. Critics have held this against the symphony. But there is no real reason why ideas should not be re-allocated in this way; after all, the practice goes back to Bach and beyond. When Elgar died in February 1934 he left over 130 pages of sketches for the unfinished symphony, most of them in short-score, with only a few instrumental indications. These pages contained the vestiges of an inspired work, yet they seem to have aroused little interest until comparatively recently.

Although my contemplation of the sketches began in 1972, it was not until 1993 that the BBC producer Paul Hindmarsh phoned to ask whether I would be interested in putting them into some sort of shape for a workshop performance. I jumped at the idea and began work on the Scherzo, for which the sketches supplied all the material. Next I managed to write out a complete exposition for the Adagio by means of jigsaw-puzzling with the sketches. The ordering of the main subjects for the remainder of the movement had to be worked out by educated guesswork and intuition. By now the BBC had sent me photocopies of the complete sketches. From a scrap of developmental music among these I began to see how I could complete the Adagio. I forged ahead and wrote the last bar on 24 February 1994, a day after the sixtieth anniversary of the composer's death. At this point I thought that I had achieved all that was possible, for Elgar had written down only the exposition and recapitulation of the first movement, while the material for the finale enabled one to assemble the exposition and no more.

All of this was shortly to become of academic interest, however, because the Elgar family, who owned the copyright to the sketches, came to the decision that they could not allow work to continue on the project. They felt a responsibility to honour Elgar's wish that no-one "tinker" with the sketches. While I sympathised with their stance, I was, of course, deeply disappointed: I had begun to feel as involved with the symphony as if it had been a piece of my own. At this stage I thought, rather dejectedly, that I would probably never return to the symphony. But the saga continued to unfold. With the family's permission I went ahead and recorded a talk about the sketches for Radio 3 in March 1995. It caused something of a stir, and convinced many that the symphony would have been of the highest quality. I returned home from the recording thinking this really was the end of the affair, but fate had other ideas. Next day, when taking a final look at the sketches, I quite suddenly discovered the key to completing the first movement - the very thing I had dismissed as impossible in my radio talk.

The idea struck with the force of a lightning bolt: I recognised that four pages of faintly outlined snippets I had previously discounted were in fact intended for the development section. Plunging in at the deep end, I completed the development and the related coda in a couple of weeks. Despite the embargo, I felt I owed it to Elgar to finish as much as I could while I felt the spirit was upon me. After the exhilarating experience of finishing the first movement, I felt for the first time that I could perhaps complete the whole symphony. It seemed as if I was being impelled by forces outside myself, and again fate took a hand. Realising that the sketches would in any case come out of copyright in 2005, allowing anyone to "tinker" with them, the Elgar family finally decided to commission from me a complete version of the symphony, and in August I began to write out in full orchestral score all that I had so far done. It was during this process that I became more consciously aware of the overall sweep of the symphony.

It was different in its sheer breadth of emotion from any of his other symphonic works: there was the raw vigour and magic lyricism of the opening movement, the use of a lighter manner in the second which went far beyond his established symphonic practice, and the searing intensity of the Adagio, tragic in its import, while the finale revealed a world of chivalric action and drama. With this in mind I faced the greatest obstacle: Elgar had left no hint as to how the symphony was going to end. I had to compose the whole of the development section and the coda - much as in the first movement but without the helpful pointers - and, toughest of all, to envision the work's ultimate goal in a manner true to Elgar's creative bravery. It was not even certain what basic structure Elgar had in mind for his finale, although I felt that the breadth of the expository material in the sketches pointed towards a sonata form. This I enriched by incorporating into the development a ravishing G minor interlude whose placing in the movement is not precisely indicated by the sketches.

As it now stands, the passage seems to have strayed from some rondo substratum, and yields a structural ambivalence which I hope is worthy of Elgar's symphonic thought. As for the symphony's closing pages, I decided to dare all in honour of Elgar's unpredictability. What if he had thought to place the haunting repetitions of "The Wagon Passes" from his recently completed Nursery Suite into a broader symphonic context? The finale's main subject actually suggests this kind of treatment, and it would lead the music away into some new visionary world, spanning the years between the composer's death and my attempted realisation of his sketches. I trusted my intuition and went ahead and wrote. © Anthony Payne BBC News | Elgar | Elgar's ultimate enigma Friday, February 13, 1998 Published at 13:13 GMT Elgar's ultimate enigma Watch this story in Real Video A new work from a composer who died more than half a century ago is certainly an enigma. The composer in question is Edward Elgar who succumbed to illness before he could complete his third symphony.

Now the piece has been finished by Anthony Payne, who calls his work an "elaboration" of Elgar's sketches. Edward Elgar, Symphony No 3 - Allegro (excerpt: 1'30"), BBC Symphony Orchestra, NMC recordings D053 This finished "unfinished symphony" is the latest variation on a trend to meddle with not quite completed works of great but late artists. Elgar's 'new' work has struck a range of notes, not all enthusiastically sounded, across his family, fans and the musical establishment. Some of Elgar's notes Before he died in 1934, Elgar, the composer of the popular Enigma Variations, told his daughter Clarice to burn the sketches for what would have been his Third Symphony, which originally had been commissioned by the BBC in 1933. But Elgar's work survived. Many decades later Radio 3, the BBC's classical music network, commissioned the British composer Anthony Payne to take the 141 sketches and shape them into a complete piece, adding his own music where Elgar did not leave sufficient material behind. Some purists of classical music see Payne's offering as the ultimate sacrilege.

Elgar relative Wulstan Atkins is enraged Although some of Elgar's descendants gave permission to bring the piece to life, others are enraged at what they see as the breaking of faith with the composer's deathbed wish for commercial exploitation. Wulstan Atkins, Elgar's godson who is now 92, last saw the composer 10 days before he died aged 76. "He was planning something quite different from the two earlier symphonies. It was going to be much lighter in texture," he said. Some Elgar scholars have also accused his family of "feasting off the corpse" of one of the great romantic composers of the 20th Century. But other critics have hailed the reworking as a triumph. "You don't have to look any further than the opening bars of the Third Symphony to realise that something special is happening here," said Stephen Johnson of the Daily Telegraph newspaper. Andrew Davis and Anthony Payne discuss the score for Elgar's 3rd Andrew Davis will conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the premiere of the work on Sunday at the Royal Festival Hall in London, and then in Philadelphia. He calls the piece "vintage Elgar.

Now that it has been done so superbly, this is absolutely the right decision." Anthony Payne, an Elgar expert, is also unrepentant, saying he "owed it" to the great composer: "I'm afraid that I find it ridiculous of great artists to say that they want their work burned. If that is really what Elgar intended, he should have burned it himself," he added. Anthony Payne: "owed" Elgar "It is nonsense to say that it is impossible to complete. Most of the shapes are there but I needed to fill in some cement to piece it together." Elgar's stirring "Land of Hope and Glory" is a mainstay and highlight of the "Last Night of the Proms" concert annually held in London in September, and which some view as an outburst of patriotic fervour. Elgar is reputed to have been urged to write the Third Symphony by playwright George Bernard Shaw when the composer plunged into depression after the death of his wife. But he is not the only composer to leave work unfinished. Schubert's Unfinished Symphony is a consistently popular choice of concert goers and Bruckner and Mahler also left behind unfinished symphonies.

Elgar, however, perhaps could have learned from Sibelius. He destroyed the manuscript of his eighth symphony before he died. A recording of Sunday's performance of Elgar's Symphony No. 3 will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Monday, February 16, at 19:30 GMT Sir Edward Elgar Find Music / Composers / Sir Edward Elgar / Soloist and Orchestra / Concerto for Cello in E minor, Op. 85 Sir Edward Elgar Biography Born: 1857 Died: 1934 Country: England Period: Romantic One of the pre-eminent musical figures of his time, Edward William Elgar (1857-1934) bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the finest English composer since the days of Handel and Purcell. Elgar's father owned a music shop and was a church organist who taught his son piano, organ, and violin; apart from this instruction, Elgar was basically self-taught as a musician. At the age of 16, the composer became a freelance musician and for Read more the remainder of his life never took a permanent job.

He conducted locally, performed, taught, and composed, scraping by until his marriage to Caroline Alice Roberts, a published novelist of some wealth, in 1889. Elgar had by this time achieved only limited recognition. He and his wife moved to London, where he scarcely fared better in advancing his career. They couple eventually retreated to Worcester, Elgar suffering from bitter self-doubt and depression. Alice stood by him the entire time, her unfailing confidence restoring his spirits. He was further buoyed by the success of his Imperial March, Op. 32, which earned him a publisher and a vital friendship with August Jaeger, his editor and confidant. In 1899, Elgar composed one of his best-known works, the "Enigma" Variations, Op. 36, which catapulted him to fame. The work is a cryptic tribute to Alice and to the many friends who stood behind the composer in the shaky early days of his career. German conductor Hans Richter proclaimed it a masterpiece, and his performances of the work in Britain and Germany established the composer's lasting success.

Elgar's most fruitful period was the first decade of the twentieth century, during which he wrote some of his noblest, most expressive music, including the Symphony No. 1 in A flat major, Op. 55 (1907-1908), and the Violin Concerto in B minor, Op. 61 (1909-1910). His best-known works from this period, however, are the first four of his Pomp and Circumstance Marches (1901-1907); the first of these, subtitled "Land of Hope and Glory," became an unofficial second national anthem for the British Empire. Elgar suffered a blow when Jaeger (the "Nimrod" of the "Enigma" Variations) died in 1909. The composer's productivity dropped, and the horrors of World War I deepened his melancholy outlook. His music became more intimate, even anguished; still, he wrote some of his best chamber music during this period, as well as the masterly Cello Concerto in E minor, Op.

85 (1919), whose deep feeling of sadness and impending loss surely relates to the final illness of his faithful Alice, who died in 1920. For some time after that, he wrote little of significance but made a historic foray into the recording studios when new electrical recording processes were developed; the fortunate result was a number of masterly interpretations of his own orchestral music that have survived for posterity. In the early '30s, Elgar set to work on a third symphony, left unfinished at his death in 1934. The work was brought to a generally well-received realization by Anthony Payne in the late '90s and was subsequently recorded. Read less Featured Sir Edward Elgar CDs & DVDs:

Question: Which composer left his Third Symphony unfinished on his death in 1934? Anthony Payne completed the work in 1997?
Answer: EDWARD ELGAR